Yesterday a school in Wichita KS was blown up. From the looks of it, it could have been caused by a nearby car bomb -- the whole side of one building was blown out, with nothing but broken beams and rubble visible -- but it wasn't terrorism. It was just good old-fashioned American incompetence: a gas leak, probably from a science lab that was under construction. Fortunately, school wasn't in session. The death toll was zero, the injuries in the single digits. Houses across the street were showered with debris. As tragedies go it was small potatoes, but it dominated the news here.

A few months back I attended an event where a panel of speakers were faced with the question, "are we safer now?" I had declined an invitation to speak, but after I heard what the panel had to say -- all lefties, all resoundingly negative -- I decided that my answer would have been different. Sure, I'd say, sure, we're safer from acts of terrorism, at least we here inside the U.S. (and you can hardly be deeper inside than in Wichita). But whether we're safer in our everyday lives is a very different question. One part of the question is how much danger are we really in due to terrorism? The answer, I suspect, is not much. Even if you buy the argument that the U.S., especially in its post-9/11 vendetta, has made the world more dangerous, there has been no measurable blowback here, and it's possible that there won't be any.

But the other part of the question is how much danger are we in from everything else? And has the policies of the Bush regime made this danger worse? I'm not sure how to measure these things, but there are some things worth pondering. For instance, aside from 9/11, take a look at a list of calamities that have befell the U.S. in the last few years: massive forest fires, a major regional blackout, SARS, hoof-and-mouth disease, a prescription drug that may have contributed to 55000 deaths. Then there was the weather: record drought in the southwest, record number of tornadoes in Kansas, record number of hurricanes in Florida. None of those things were caused by terrorism. But all of them are things that we habitually look to government to solve. Whether we are safer now depends to some extent on whether government is more capable of defending us from real threats. Even if you grant that vigorous political response has made us safer from terrorism, that doesn't mean that we are safer in general.

The list of calamities above doesn't begin to exhaust the list of things that can go wrong. The terrorism that we've thus far avoided, presumably by fighting abroad instead of having to fight at home, is still a threat. Vast resources go both to fighting terrorism and to turning the U.S. into a fortress. Meanwhile, our two great strengths -- government and the private sector economy -- are becoming emaciated for political purposes. Both accumulate massive debt, and perhaps more dangerously both have been repurposed to serve narrow special interests. Government increasingly belongs to a political class that trades favors in order to perpetuate its own rule. (The Republicans are better at this than the Democrats, but Clinton was especially competitive in this regard. The Defense Establishment is the best example of self-perpetuating government immune from partisan politics, but much of what government does is conceived of as reinforcing the political blocks that elect it.) The effect of this is to reverse the long trend of U.S. politics, which was to make the government more servile to the public.

The private sector has also seen its priorities shift. The idea that made the private sector grow so strongly in the U.S. was that by providing genuinely useful and valuable goods and services the capitalists would be rewarded with profit. The new logic of business is that it exists solely in order to make profit, and any production of useful and valuable goods and services is merely tactical -- one of several viable ways to make profit. Other ways include reducing costs, avoiding competition, and plain old scamming. Moreover, the private sector uses government to pursue its narrow objectives. Among the losers in this equation are the workers -- the people who actually produce those goods and services -- and one of the big effects of this is that the quality of work goes down. When the quality of work slips to the point where things break we call that incompetence. And when incompetence happens, schools blow up. The difference between blowing a school up by incompetence or by the malevolence of terrorism doesn't amount to much: both are side-effects of the misguided way we run the world (or let those in power try to run the world).

All this might not matter much if the world were a well balanced static system, but it isn't. We live in a world where resources are shrinking while demand expands. We live in a world where expertise is becoming rarefied, putting us at the mercy of experts who may or may not have our interests at heart. We live in a world where a clever few can exploit the ignorant many, but even the clever few have to compete so ruthlessly that they lose their grip -- they've constructed a world of hair triggers that surrender control and amplify panic. We live in a world where the "movers and shakers" move and shake so fast that they've become incapable of recognizing the unexpected. We live in a world which continues to cling to the ideology that the pursuit of private advantages serves the common good, even though there are few if any cases where this is true. And we live in a nation that has promoted its misconceptions to such staggering heights that some sort of horrible crash seems inevitable.

A few years back Robert D. Kaplan wrote a book called An Empire Wilderness, where he traveled around the U.S. One of his observations was made crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S., which he described as the starkest, most radical shift in the world. His prime example was based on two motels, a new one on the Mexican side that had already fallen into disrepair, and an older one on the U.S. side which was still immaculately maintained. The lesson there is that what made America so much a richer and more pleasant place than Mexico was the care and dilligence that American workers took in their work. However, that care and dilligence is a passing concern, one that gets little encouragement and much discouragement from the public and private sector powers in the U.S. today. Once it's gone the border between the U.S. and Mexico will cease to matter.

I saw an opinion piece in the Wichita Eagle recently (sorry I don't have the citation) that was written by an economist at a "labor think tank." The subject was the decline of the value of the dollar, and the author was in favor of it. In fact, he looked forward to further declines -- a subject that people have started to talk about now that Bush is safely ensconced for four more wars (uh, years). The reason is that a lower dollar favors exports of U.S. manufactures. The importance he attributes to the manufacturing sector in the U.S. is undoubted, but he runs into one big problem: U.S. manufacturing contributes next to nothing to the U.S. balance of trade. A cheaper dollar cannot improve the viability of an export industry that doesn't exist. At best it might stimulate some investment to create one, but as long as labor and other factors can be purchased cheaper outside of the U.S. it is more likely that U.S. capital will invest elsewhere. What the cheaper dollar does do is to make imports more expensive, which reduces our standard of living.

It is no accident that the only time real wages rose in the U.S. during the last 35 years was when the dollar was itself gaining strength -- in the late '90s. The keys to this were a technology boom (specifically the internet), which was led by the U.S. and stimulated a lot of business investment, and the reduction of federal deficits. The former burned out for a lot of reasons; the latter was squandered by George W. Bush. The only new export industry Bush has grown has been war, where we've shipped $150-200 billion to Iraq and Afghanistan and turned it into smoke and rubble, but this hardly counts as an export: the money goes the wrong way.